Hello,
I noticed the default jam entries filter is Popular which tends to create a snowball effect on good entries as they receive more and more comments and good ratings, and even more as they are displayed on top of the page, as I described on this thread: https://itch.io/t/3451166/game-jam-filters-how-does-the-popular-filter-work-where-is-most-karma-set-random-to-default
This is not bad per se as the players are guaranteed to find good games when they visit the jam submission page, however, for jammers it is more stressful to work on 3 months like the others and receive almost no feedback because we are stuck at the bottom of the grid. It may be that our entry is simply not good enough (but then feedback may help us improve), or that our entry does not look good enough to entice people to click on thumbnails and play (in which case we don’t get a chance to get appreciated on actual content).
In jams that have an official rating period (with stars) and ranking at the end of that period, I saw some of them enforcing the “Rating queue” system: the first entries you rate must be selected randomly from the list, to ensure good distribution of ratings. However, I’m not sure if that feature is available for jams that don’t have actual ratings like this one. It could be reused without the ratings, just as “the first N entries for which you comment on the jam entry page must be random”, but I noticed that on this particular jam, most people prefer commenting directly on the main page, not the jam entry page, so this would not affect them much.
So an alternative would simply be to encourage users to try different filters. Is there is a setting to set “Random” filter as default, for instance, it would allow players to be less affected by others’ ratings, esp. during the period just after the jam end which is critical to decide what gets popular and what doesn’t. “Popular” would make more sense to use later (since there is no official “rating period”, it’s quite arbitrary but I guess one month after the jam end would make sense) since people are now visiting old jams and there are many of them, so they generally care about the best entries only.
In addition, I saw other jams like the Mini Jam showing additional filters: Most Karma (a bit like Ludum Dare), Most Rated, Least Rated. Most Karma and Least Rated would be very useful to spread comments over the different jam entries. Did you have options to enable them in your jam host interface?
I just tried to create a dummy jam just to test, and I see no such thing on the creation apge interface. Maybe they appear only after games get enough comments? Which is a pity for smaller jams which may never reach them.
Anyway, this is not criticism I have towards this particular jam: I had the same issue with all previous Nanoreno jams, and to be honest I just take part to those jams to experiment these days, and I stopped expecting getting that much feedback until I make a really high-quality game. However, that’s for 100+ entries, and this jam is more like 30+ entries, that’s 2 pages in the browser, so I’m sure that spreading playtests over all the entries is feasible.
Of course, for users who come not because of the jam but because they followed a specific developer or did a wild search on itch, it’s more understandable that they just comment on the main page and don’t use the jam entry filter system. I haven’t the stats for such users though, so I cannot tell if there are so many following users in comparison to people interested in the jam as a whole that this is the main reason for focused feedback, or if it’s more related to filters.
If there is a way to make Random the default filter (otherwise recommend using it on the main jam page for the first month), we could at least try it and see what impact it has on the feedback.